It's always awesome to see new Christmas specials every year. It had seemed for a while the only new one's we got were Pixar or Dreamworks properties given forced holiday stories. So it's nice to see new ideas. For example, Toon Disney gave us a brand-new CGI Mickey special with an original story. It started out ok but they wrote themselves into such a corner that the ending was totally forced and kinda ruined it for me. Another special that came along this year was a little treat called...
This apparently began life as a book by Tonight Show host and SNL alum Jimmy Fallon. It's a kids book so of course I never heard of it. How does the animated special hold up?
The plot is pretty straightforward. A kid is all excited about Christmas and has it all planned. And I do mean planned. Every second to the letter from getting the tree to the Christmas show he always performs on Christmas Day. However, things get thrown into disarray when his mother reveals his new boyfriend will be spending Christmas with them, including his little girl I was looking for the boy's name, but I guess he doesn't get one. That kinda leads to a problem with the special but I will ge to that. The point is that the boy's plans are thrown into disarray when the girl picks her own tree, messes up what kind of cookies they are making, destroys the boy's sled and finally destroys the Christmas Tree by accident. Eventually the boy realizes he was being a jerk and all ends well.
Ok, so the good stuff in this includes the animation. It looks like it was based on a storybook but that's a good thing since it was. Kind of like how Polar Express or even the old Grinch cartoon resemble their source material. A lot of people complain about Fallon's narration, and yeah maybe he should have gotten a more professional actor but it was his project and his story so I can let it go. The voice acting was fine, and our main character felt like a real kid and was relatable. The story premise is decent although not that original, but it had potential. However...
Yeah, so let's get into the not so good stuff. I said the main character was well done the rest were really flat. You barely get to know the parents and the even the little girl could have been developed more. She came of like a Minion at first, just gigging but no personality. That's always a problem when adapting a book to movie, you can get away with flat characters in a book a lot easier. With this story setup you can guess where it's going to go. The kid is going to learn Christmas doesn't mean having everything perfect and it's not just "his" Christmas. That's fine but the story doesn't really get there. I wish it had been longer and taken time to build these characters more. When the big scene arrives where the lesson is to be learned, the special just hasn't earned the moment. Even the fun cookie scene just doesn't feel earned. And the story has on major flaw, that being the kids do way to much unsupervised. They almost get killed sledding all by themselves and then when the girl wrecks the tree while decorating by herself, she runs away and the boy runs out to find her, by himself. Of course, the parents finally catch up but where were they?? Even Mariah Carey's special a few years ago, while clichéd knew to develop the characters so we would care about them.
Is it bad? No. It does teach its lesson and manages to be an entraining half hour of TV. I also did like our main character. Could it have been better if it has been a longer run time or stronger writing? Oh, my yes. Not the greatest but as I said, it's always nice to see something new and original.
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